No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky by Basil Davidson

Zachariah Mampilly is the director of Africana Studies and an associate professor of political science and international studies at Vassar College.

Among his many notable books are The African Genius (1969) and The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (1992). He was also a passionate advocate for contemporary anti-colonial struggles, and witnessed many of these struggles first hand.

After the war, he went on to become a leading authority on Portuguese Africa, and was one of the first scholars to emphasize the pre-colonial achievements of African civilizations, as well the damaging effects wreaked on the continent by colonialism. Born in Bristol in 1914, he worked as a journalist for the Times, the New Statesman and other publications, as well as serving in the Second World War as an intelligence officer in Nazi-occupied Europe. Featuring a preface by Cape Verde's first president, Aristides Pereira, and a foreword by Cabral himself, No Fist is Big Enough to Hide the Sky remains an invaluable resource for the study both of the region and of African liberation struggles as a whole.īasil Davidson ranks as one of the most remarkable Africanist historians of his generation. The book also provides one of the earliest accounts of the assassination of the PAIGC's founder, Amilcar Cabral, and documents the movement's remarkable success in recovering from the death of its leader and in eventually attaining independence. Basil Davidson, a leading authority on Portuguese Africa who witnessed many of these events first hand, draws on his own extensive experience in the country as well as the PAIGC archives to provide a detailed and rigorous analysis of the conflict. Though perhaps less well known than the struggles in Angola and Mozambique, the liberation war waged by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) easily ranks alongside those conflicts as an example of an African independence movement triumphing against overwhelming odds. No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky stands as a key text in the history of the eleven-year struggle against Portuguese rule in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.

No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky by Basil Davidson